In his many time-traveling adventures, Bugs Bunny frequently resides in or returns to the chivalric landscape of the Middle Ages – and is always unimpressed. It is, in his dismissive assessment, a “booby hatchery” (“Knight-mare Hare,” 1955).For this avatar of American cool, the past stands not as a lost Golden Age of idealized romance but as a madcap landscape similar to those of his contemporary adventures: a backdrop against which a pursuit unfolds, with his determined but hapless antagonists finding themselves stymied in their every effort to defeat this rascally rabbit. Bugs’s coolness – as evident in his catchphrases, his metacommentary on the cartoons’ narrative action, and his gender play – assists him in transcending the snares of the Middle Ages. His coolness also accentuates the queerness of other characters enacting outdated gender roles, whether those of the past or of the present.

Bugs Bunny’s every action displays his mid-century American coolness, which he models through a constant air of detachment, irony, and unflappability. Bob Clampett, who directed dozens of Looney Tunes cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s, ventriloquized his understanding of the character: “Some people call me cocky and brash, but actually I’m just self-assured. I’m nonchalant, imperturbable, contemplative. I play it cool.”Coolness emerged as a distinct mode of self-performance in the twentieth century, as Peter Stearns documents in his definitive study of this style: “Being a cool character means conveying an air of disengagement, of nonchalance […]. Cool has become an emotional mantle, sheltering the whole personality from embarrassing excess.”Even when he is hounded, hunted, and harassed, Bugs Bunny may lose his temper, he may explode in an emotional outburst, but he rarely loses his cool. By the conclusion of virtually every cartoon in his animated canon, he has controlled the antic situation and ultimately won the upper hand through his never-failing ingenuity. Bugs may occasionally lose a matchup against an adversary – such as when Cecil Turtle and his allies outwit him in a rematch of Aesop’s classic turtle-versus-hare race (“Tortoise Beats Hare,” 1941; see also “Rabbit Transit,” 1947) – but he typically remains coolly in control even in defeat.